Timothy Hallinan - The Queen of Patpong

"A month or two," Kwan said, trying it on. "But it's-"

"You're not really lying," Fon said. "You're just telling them what they want to hear."

To her surprise, most of the men were all right. They treated her gently and tipped her well. Some of them bought her dinner, one of them at the restaurant to which Fon had taken her. Many of them took her three and four nights in a row, which eased Kwan's mind, because she knew what to expect from them. Some of them paid her much more than the other girls said they earned, and Kwan instinctively kept quiet about the occasional bonanza.

A few customers bought her clothes, which she returned for cash the day they left Bangkok, or jewelry, which she hid inside the cushions on the couch. Almost all the men told her she was beautiful, and a few of them seemed almost embarrassed by her beauty, as though they'd never been with anyone who looked like her and didn't feel worthy of her. These men made her uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as the ones who wanted to do things that she could hardly believe.

Fortunately, there weren't many of those. After one especially bad experience-one of the three times she had to run from the room, naked and clutching her clothes until she could leave the fire stairs two floors down and get dressed again-she and Fon worked out a list of won'ts to be recited aloud and agreed to before she left the bar with any new customer. Most of the things on the list were things Kwan hadn't known anyone did, ever, anywhere in the world. Just saying these things out loud embarrassed her when she first started to recite them, but once in a while a man would back away, disappointed, when she made herself clear.

With a twinge of malice, she started suggesting to those men that they take the plump girl who had bumped against her, and some of them did. Much to Kwan's surprise, the plump girl began to smile at her. Kwan did her best to smile back, although what she really felt was an unexpected surge of pity.

Still, despite the precautions, once in a while she went with someone who forced her to do what he wanted, who hurt or humiliated her and wouldn't let her get to her clothes. On those nights she left the hotel rooms feeling soiled and worthless, and that feeling lingered until Fon reminded her that it was the man, not she, who should be ashamed.

Still, even when the men weren't abusive, even when they were people she enjoyed while she was talking with them or eating with them, the sex was a problem. It took her months to get over an almost paralyzing shyness when she had to reveal her body. She tried to get the customers to turn off the lights, or at least dim them, but only a few would agree. Most of them turned on everything, so the room seemed to her to dazzle with light, and she could feel their eyes like a touch, almost like a scrape against her skin.

Some of the men were impatient with her shyness, but more of them liked it. It seemed to Kwan that these men created a kind of drama out of it, a two-person play in which she was the novice, the just-arrived stranger in a new country, and they were the experts, the men with the map, who could lead her into hidden territory, show her the points of interest, introduce her to new sensations. They seemed to relish the role. When she pretended at last to enjoy herself, she could almost see them mentally patting themselves on the back. If they'd spoken their thoughts, she believed, they would have said, She'll remember me.

In fact, though, the individual man each of them had seemed to be when she first met him disappeared the moment the clothes came off. They became a kind of terrain to be navigated, some places more attentively than others. The person vanished, leaving a raspy chin, a sharp hangnail, an odor of butter or meat, too much hair on the body, fatness or flatness, a penis that needed more attention than a baby. The things Fon taught her, which she had thought of as tricks, became a kind of vocabulary, to be modified depending on the reactions they provoked. While she was doing them, she was focused only on the physical part of the man the trick involved.

She learned early not to call anyone by name during sex. While she was working on whoever it was tonight, he was indistinguishable from who it had been last night or who it was three weeks ago. Only later, when they were sitting up in the bed, he contented and satiated and Kwan with the covers tugged up to her armpits, counting the minutes until she could leave, would she venture the slightly risky Eddie or Jack.

She took Fon's advice and went mostly with older men, so she was safe from youthful male beauty. Occasionally a girl talked about how she taught her customers to get her off, how many orgasms she managed with this one or that one. They passed the best-trained ones around, either handing them on to a friend or suggesting a threesome. Kwan had no idea what they were talking about. When, about three months after she began to dance, a customer unexpectedly coaxed her into the first orgasm of her life, she lay bewildered until a flood of guilt washed over her. She had to fight tears. It felt like a betrayal, although of what or of whom she couldn't say. She guarded against it after that. For some reason enjoying the sex seemed worse than enduring it.

Most days, just after she woke in the early afternoon, she would roll over on the couch and reach down to the floor for the big leather purse she'd taken to carrying. She'd feel around in it until she found the notebook, and then she'd flip through the pages and pass her finger over all the names written there. Names, only names.

Over time the new world grew familiar. She learned its rules and pitfalls, and she made decisions about how she would live in it. She bought nice clothes, but not many of them. She kept to the first friends she had made and only occasionally added new ones. She sent money weekly to her mother. After a month of hesitation, she wrote a letter to Teacher Suttikul that was almost true, saying she was safe and well, living in Bangkok and working in a bar where she didn't have to do anything bad. Teacher Suttikul wrote back, and after that they exchanged letters every month or so. Kwan asked her teacher to keep an eye on Mai. One month she sent Teacher Suttikul four thousand baht for pens and writing paper for the students. Teacher Suttikul wrote a letter of thanks but told Kwan to keep her money. Kwan knew that the letter meant her teacher understood where the money really came from and wanted Kwan to save as much as she could so she could quit as soon as possible.

And she did save money, even as she continued to send it home. Unlike Fon, unlike any girl she knew in the bar, she walked into a bank one day carrying a wad of cash and asked how to open an account. Twenty minutes later she had a passbook with her own name on it, making it official that she had thirty-nine hundred baht in her account. She hid the passbook beneath the couch when she wasn't using it and gave the bank account its own pages in the first little spiral notebook, and then the second and the third. Every time she noted a deposit, she would flip back over the pages listing the earlier ones. She became adept at dividing the amount in the account by the number of days she'd been depositing into it, then multiplying ahead to see how much she'd have in six months, in a year. She thought of the American hundred-dollar units as "Franklins" in honor of the bald old man whose face was on the bill. She was accumulating Franklins at an impressive pace. The bank became part of her routine, but she only went there alone. Even Fon didn't know about it.

Fon helped her economize by teaching her about makeup, showing her the things Tra-La had done to bring out her best features. As Kwan's hair grew, though, she visited Tra-La once a week to have it shaped and trimmed. The spiky look disappeared, replaced by a tapering fall of thick black hair, perfectly straight, that gleamed as though it had been oiled. Slowly, it reached her shoulders and then a few inches below.